Power Trio

“And the fifth of that note is…” Nick prompts.

“C?”

“Ah, remember we’re going whole step, whole step, half step, whole step. So it’s…”

“B.”

“B major.” Nick smiles and plays the chord. “That’s right.”

“Didn’t know it was this much letters and numbers.” Dee shakes her fretting hand out.

“First thing you always realize when you pick up the guitar is you don’t know the alphabet like you thought you did.”

“This shit ain’t even my first alphabet.”

“That makes it more impressive you’re getting it,” he says.

Dee likes to think she knows a thing or two about motivating and moving people. Nick combines praise when it’s not business time with a touch of withholding when it is. It’s a familiar method, but he’s good enough at it she feels it working on her anyway. Whenever he makes her grin while she’s playing she feels like a virtuoso. It’s something about his face, maybe. He’s got such a dark resting expression, like a brooding prince from an Elfheim tragedy, that even with his happy-go-lucky personality, a smile is hard to imagine until it happens.

“Okay,” Nick says. “Let’s switch to something fun. Play me a G major chord.”

Dee bites her lip as she tries to remember.

“Good.” That grin again. “Now D major. Pointer finger on the second fret, remember.”

Strum. These shapes he’s having her make feel so unnatural.

“Now C major. Make sure you’re not muting that open string.”

Dee squeezes her digits into the shape. “My fingers are too big for this thing.”

Anise peers over her drumkit. Dee is feeling sore that the elf is here; she’s looking like a dummy in front of her employer and she wanted to grill Nick about magic. He should have asked her first.

“It might feel that way right now,” Nick says. “You’re still developing your pathways. Trust me, it’s gonna get easier. And with those three chords under your fingers we’ve got enough to do what, a few thousand songs you can play now.” He hefts his own guitar. “Let’s jam some. G is home base for us, D and C are flavor. You can take point, Dee.”

“What do I play?”

“Whatever feels right. That’s what we’re developing.”

“So what. I just fuck around?”

“Exactly. That’s music. All these numbers and letters we’re learning, those came second. It’s the names we made up for the fuck-aroundage. This is the privilege of our brains. We’re aware of our own mortality, and we have all these anxieties about the future and problems we invented for ourselves. But we have music and we have the instinct to make it. That’s our consolation prize.”

Dee chuckles. He clearly thought a lot about that little speech and was excited to give it; the bridge of his nose does this little crinkle when he gets excited. “All right, Nicky the Philosopher. Let’s, uh…” G is home base, he said. So she starts there.

“Loose in the wrist. That’s it. Good.” Nick joins in, plays a plinky line above her chord. He nods to Anise, who taps out a hesitant rhythm. Dee feels her body reorienting itself around those drums. Her foot is tapping.

Something inside her tells her to switch up, and she twists her fingers into another of Nick’s fiddly little shapes across the strings. She hits a sour note and hastily corrects; Nick gives an encouraging nod as she finds the chord, and shifts his lead line over.

Anise watches Dee’s strumming hand, morphs her snare drum to follow it. Dee’s tusks show themselves as she breaks into a grin. They’re all fitting together. She’s playing music. Shitty, sloppy music. But music. She laughs like a little kid.

Nicky is good at this. Dee was already impressed when he made that abortive attempt at an incantation. But now that she’s giving this a shot for herself she sees just how high a mountain she’d need to climb to play like he’s playing. He isn’t even thinking about it. The music just comes out of him.

She didn’t know Anise could look so loose and buoyant. The high elf’s eyes are closed. Her head tilts along with the rhythm. Her neck is longer and more graceful than Dee realized now that her shoulders aren’t hunched up. Kell Kamiyon drums like a wildfire, with two kick drums and machine-gun speed. Anise Cantator is a lot more skeletal and spare. Each hit is precise and decisive, and on her fills her eyes flutter shut and she bares her blunt teeth. Dee’s getting over her resentment at the high elf’s presence. Playing with drums is a blast.

Nick leads the three of them into a slowdown and a stop. “That,” he says, “was more or less a twelve-bar blues, what you just played. And nobody taught you how. You see what I mean?”

“Yeah, man.” Dee blows across her fingertips. “My fingers sting like a sonovabitch.”

“That’ll happen,” he says. “It’s gonna feel unpleasant for a while but you’ll earn your calluses soon.”

“I believe it, Nicky.” Dee sets the guitar aside. “What do you say we call that the lesson for the day, and go earn you yours.”

“Are we done already?” Anise blows some of her forest-green hair out of her eyes and taps her hi-hat. She’s already tensing up again in the traps.

“Me and Nick are, but you should keep it going, An. You’re sounding like a pro, y’know.” She stands, and feels a certain satisfaction at the light she just brought to the high elf’s face. “But we’re shipping off to Karadamos City tomorrow, so no time like the present. We’re gonna teach Nicky here how to hunt.”

“He will be a burden.” Graila gives their hunting party’s guest a dim look as she loads her rifle.

“We’ll bear it,” Dee replies.

“Shouldn’t you be teaching me about, like, trigger discipline?” Nick holds his own gun gingerly. “Don’t point this at anything you don’t want to destroy, that sort of thing?”

Graila raises an eyebrow as she picks her own gun out from the depot wall. “Sounds like you got all that handled already, little man.”

“Destroy.” Dee sticks her utility knife in its sheathe. “A’rwokk.”

Nick tries. “Arawok.”

“We’ll work on the pronunciation.” She tosses him a canteen. “Use it in a sentence.”

Nick pauses as he shoulders his kit on, sucks air in through his teeth. “I big destroy the outhouse.”

Warrin, their best tracker, snorts as he feeds bullets into a magazine. “He sounds concussed.”

“He sounds… something,” Nick says.

“We’re getting there.” Dee taps the harness Nick’s strapped himself into. “Don’t put that on yet, Nick. Last step is we stoke your tangr’ak. Helps on the hunt.”

“What’s tangr’ak?”

“Bonfires of heaven, man.” Graila scoffs. “You don’t know what tangr’ak is?”

“Maybe he doesn’t have it,” Warrin says.

“He has it.” Dee doesn’t look at them. “Your human half raised you, didn’t they, Nicky?”

“They did.”

“You ever have temper issues as a kid? Acting out for reasons nobody understood?”

Nick rubs the back of his neck. “Uh, oppositional defiant disorder, they said. I went to therapy over it.”

“Figures.” Dee pats her chest. “That’s tangr’ak. Right here. Humans don’t know it or know what to do with it. I bet you were a holy terror, huh?”

“I don’t really want to dwell on it.”

“All good, Nicky. We’re gonna dig that back up.”

“That seems… unhealthy.”

“It can be.” Dee pulls her own harness off. “If you don’t know how to use it. Tangr’ak’s your engine. You wanna keep up with the pack, you’re gonna have to learn how to harness it. And how to start it up.”

There’s a rattle from the other end of the depot. Nick looks behind Dee and his eyes go wide. Dee glances over her shoulder. Warrin’s got Graila up on a crate of ammunition, her legs wrapped around him. Her hand goes into his hair and yanks as she takes command of their kiss.

“That’s one way.” Dee chuckles as Nick’s stricken look transfers back to her. “Not what we’re gonna be doing.” She takes a hopping little step back. “Come at me. Nothing above the neck or below the belt and no biting.”

Nick shakes his head in disbelief. “I can’t just—”

Dee drops into stance. “I’mma count down from three and then I go for you instead.” She holds up her fingers. “Three, two…”

Nick launches himself at her, binds his arms around her waist in a real goofball of a tackle attempt. She lets him bring her to the ground and flips him over her with his momentum, coming up in an underhook and driving a knee into his midsection. She straightens as he hacks and tries to get his breath back. “What the fuck,” he wheezes.

“You’re pissed.” She dances backward. “Step into that and out the other side. Find the clarity.”

“The fuck are you talking about?” He rises to his feet, expression even stormier than usual.

Graila unwraps herself from Warrin. “Fuck him up, boss!”

Nick comes at her again. This attempt is met with a sliding trip and her thighs wrapped around his neck in a triangle choke.

Dee leers. She’s feeling her tangr’ak sparking to life. I like how you look down there, boy, she thinks, but she says: “Tap, Nicky.”

He does, slapping the outside of her leg, and she lets him go. He’s breathing heavy, fists balled up.

“You wanna break something now, don’t you?” Dee says. “You’re looking to get one over on me. You’re a little horny.”

He nods. His eyes are dark and shiny.

“Take that. Breathe out the anger and the irrationality. Keep the rest. The rest is tangr’ak.” She stands and pulls him up with her. She taps her fist against his chest. “You feel that?”

There’s a vein standing out in his forehead. “I feel it.”

Dee slaps his shoulder and pulls her harness back on. “We hunt.”